Dota 2 Is Having A Weird Week On Steam

The wait for Dota 2 ’s Dueling Fates update, a major patch that will introduce two new heroes to Valve’s MOBA, still has no end in sight. But the game still managed to find itself in headlines this week, after a momentary dethroning by PUBG and a flash of anger from the Half Life community, albeit for reasons the Dota 2 team would rather not celebrate.

Last week, former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw published a short story that has been widely interpreted to be a proposed plot for the never-released Half-Life 2: Episode 3. That interpretation led an even greater number of people to assume we’ll never get another addition to the Half-Life series, which ended without wrapping up any of its most significant plot lines. Neither Laidlaw nor Valve have offered any comment on the rumors, but that hasn’t stopped a small segment of the Half-Life community from lashing out all the same. Over the weekend, Steam users angered by the perceived end of Half-Life review-bombed Valve’s current cash-cow, Dota 2 (h/t PCGamesN). It hasn’t seriously impacted the game’s Steam rating, thanks to 700,000-plus positive reviews, but it was enough for some Dota 2 fans to start posting positive reviews that also took aim at Half-Life.

Steam users also took notice when PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds managed to dethrone Dota 2 from the Top Games list, not once, but twice in the span of three days. PUBG first managed to claim the top spot on Saturday, which may or may not be responsible for the server outage the community experienced that morning. Bluehole’s massively successful shooter, which recently celebrated more than 8 million unit sold, managed to repeat its leaderboard success in the early hours of Monday morning as well. Dota 2 has since regained the top spot, but peak user counts for each game still tilt in PUBG ’s favor by ~46K users (as of 5 p.m. EST).